


Hand To Mouth

by flollius



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Disability, Dwarvish Culture, F/M, Family Feels, Kili why are you always a main character in my fics, Runs parallel to the canonical plot, Sign Language, Slight Ableism, backstory exploration, of course, this isn't even about you, you little shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 18:39:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3988555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flollius/pseuds/flollius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He had an injury.”</p><p>My take on Bifur's past, including his wife, his accident, and who he is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hand To Mouth

“He had an injury.”

Bifur sees the way Mr Baggins looks at him - the great hunk of metal sticking out of his head, his wild eyes and wild hair and silent, unmoving mouth. He flinches in fear, instinctively draws back, and Bifur can say nothing to defend himself. He can never tell his story. Bofur thinks that it can all be summed up in half a sentence, a quiet aside to the halfling that breaks the bubbling flow of talk for half a moment with a murmuring undercurrent of sympathy. He’s used to explaining what’s wrong with Bifur by now. Before the little creature can even stumble some sort of response, Bifur is back in his seat at the long table, as silent and ignored as a hat-stand in the corner. Sometimes he’s jealous of the way his cousin can twist his words and spin a yarn in a blink of an eye. It rises in Bifur’s gut, sick and burning like he’s eaten something rotten and it’s putrefying in his insides. Tonight, Bofur is rivalled by the tipsy swagger of Thorin’s nephews and their voices rise to a shout, boasting and one-upping each other until their stories border on the incredulous. At least Thorin brings in a quiet with his entrance. It’s a continuum of reverence and curiosity, and Bifur can feel the others slide along it. There’s a fire in his eyes that casts a rare silence over the halfling’s homely dining table, at least for a little while.

In Mr Baggins’ cosy little drawing room, they sing. Bifur listens, moving his lips although no sound will ever come out of them, closing his eyes and feeling the ancient words move around him, rustling like leaves in the wind.

-

Memories for Bifur have taken on a new meaning ever since his ‘accident’ (although why it’s called an accident he doesn’t quite understand, because he knows the orc had every intention of splitting his head open). They first came in flashes and fragments, sounds and colours, tastes and smells that are knotted in his head, mismatched threads that he spends hours and hours trying to weave into something that resembles the past. He remembered things like a sharp round emerald with a black speck in the middle, the strong, biting smell of lye, a gleaming blade that slices through flesh and bone and a hacking, retching cough. After five years of trying to remember, Bifur sketched an image of his mother, clumsy as a child’s, who worked as a butcher after his father had died and did her best to keep her clothes clean and had a nasty cough and wide green eyes. Sometimes he had trouble discerning the truth from the fantasies in his head, and he wondered secretly if it’s all an invention, and the accident had wiped everything out and started him over.

But in the thirty years between then and now, Bifur has re-remembered almost everything. If he closes his eyes he can see Erebor in the years before her downfall. He can see his mother, smiling with all the lines around her eyes and her bloodstained apron. He can see, although he never chances more than a fleeting glimpse in his head, the smiles of his wife and son. The past remains locked away in his head and as Bifur sits and listens to his cousin prattle on night after night at the pub, at his house, at Bombur’s dinner table, they linger on, unspoken, growing grey and dusty in their age.

-

It’s difficult to sleep in the wild. The smell of rain reminds Bifur too much of his not-accident and he finds himself jerking awake at every disembodied whisper in the night, every snap of a twig and shifting of a branch. Bombur falls asleep; Bofur snores beside him, his hat pulled down over his eyes while Bombur snuffles, his massive stomach gurgling and growling.

He finds himself lying awake and staring up at the stars. There’s never any silence. It’s not like lying in the mountain-belly of Ered Luin and Eerebor, as deaf and blind as an unborn child. The world lurches and spins beneath them, never quiet, never still. One night, there’s a distant screaming in the dark, one that makes his heart seize in his throat and every vein fill with liquid ice-fire in his body, leaving a cold sweat seeping throat his weathered skin.

Quick and quiet, Kili whispers, nestled in the cleft of the jagged rockface. No screams, just lots of blood. Bifur feels hatred swell and he wants to shake the stupid boy, scream in his face until his voice is a faded rasp. _What do you know?_ The voice echoes only in his mind. _What do you know of blood and suffering?_

Bilbo doesn’t know about Azanulbizar, and Balin guesses now is as good a time as any to learn. Bifur listens dully to a story he’s heard a thousand times before, one nestled in the more sacred recesses of his memory. He stops listening, plays with his wind-up bird and Bofur shoots him an admonishing look. He’s forgotten that Bifur lived through it. A lot of people do; Azanulbizar has become a part of the distant past. It’s now a story fathers and uncles tell to their children in the quiet depths of night, but Bifur doesn’t have a voice or a son anymore, and so the stories scrabble around in his mind like rats sealed in a trap, unable to get out.

-

He had always been quiet, little Bifur, son of a Broadbeam and a technical outsider of Durin’s Folk. His grandparents on his mother’s side migrated to Erebor before Mama was born, drawn to the promise of gold like moths to a flame. Although he was an only child, Bifur had a sprawling extended family of several dozen cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles and a great-aunt and a few almost-nieces and nephews already. He and Mama lived with an aunt and uncle on Papa’s side and their six children, and Bifur shared a bed with his cousin Bekur, a big-mouthed dwarrow a year old than him who stole his socks and made him sleep on the wall-side and blamed Bifur whenever he wet the bed. In a life of tussling children, porridge doled out in an assembly line with no seconds, shirts that had already been worn to holes by two others and being the last to use the bathwater, Bifur melted into the background and became almost silent. Some people said he was touched in the head. Others said he was just a bit simple. If anyone were to ask him why he was so withdrawn and quiet, Bifur would just shrug and say that he didn’t like talking. It was such a pale response, and although it was true, nobody seemed to believe him.

When he was twenty, Bifur starting going down the mines in Erebor to help out around the house. He volunteered to work in the deepest seams for slightly extra pay; the stone was colder and wetter, the air so thick it was sometimes hard to breathe, but it was something he never had in his too-small home – silence. Working by touch in the darkness, feeling ore from layers of mountain-rock, Bifur could hold his breath and feel a complete and total silence, his whole body throbbing in time with his heart, the mountain shuddering around him.

-

In the troll-cave, his kin bustle about gathering fragments of gold and gems. It’s all dirty, clumsy stuff, and Bifur isn’t interested in it. He finds the flecked steer’s skull more interesting, the way the minerals have mottled on the bone and how the edges are cracked and browning. There’s something beautiful in the way decay has gripped this clean white bone and Bifur admires it. When he hears Kili sniggering at him, Bifur pretends not to listen, and Dwalin snaps at him to shut up soon enough anyway.

They’re all protective of him, the older dwarves, Dwalin and Balin especially. They remember the old Bifur, the one that isn’t crazy and injured and who only had one oar in the water, if you know what I mean. At least somebody remembers, Bifur thinks bitterly as he throws the steer’s skull back into its open grave of dirt and rotted leaves and cobwebs.

-

His mother died in the burning of Erebor, crushed when the timber frames of her butcher’s shop charred and collapsed. Their stifling, cluttered home was destroyed, and most of his family, living in one of the poorer neighbourhoods by the mines, were killed. Only his youngest aunt survived, little Bera, who threw herself in Bifur’s arms in the scorched foothills of Erebor and sobbed and sobbed.

He was too tired and hungry to feel anything about what had happened. It was hard enough fighting the bitter-cold winter, shaking frost off his blankets in the morning and marching for miles a day on an empty stomach. His hale miner’s body began to hollow out, skin browning and blistering at at the neck and hands and elbows. They split in two; wives and daughters and the sick and elderly in a sheltered valley, the fit dwarves trying their luck in the villages to try and get enough money to last the winter. The healthy sons and fathers found work as labourers if they were lucky, digging ditches and splitting rocks and cutting down pine trees in eighteen-hour shifts to earn a few copper coins.

They sang as they worked, deep rumbling songs that sound as though they were rising from the earth itself, and Bifur found himself humming. If they had a mine, Bifur would hear in the darkness as they pressed close together for sleep, then they could make their own wealth, seek out new rivers of gold in the stone, build a new home more glorious than Erebor herself. But after months of their bondage to the land of men, their spirits wither. They lie silent and broken at night, and their songs sink back down into the dirt, unuttered.

-

The night after they sneak out of Rivendell, Bifur is paired with a disgraced Kili on watch duty. Between teasing Bilbo about the orcs and nearly getting the entire company eaten for breakfast by wandering trolls, it’s obvious that Thorin’s nephews can’t be trusted together for more than a few minutes, and for some reason it’s Bifur that draws the short straw.

“But he’s crazy!” Kili hisses loudly in the darkness, making no pretence at grace. “ _Please_ , uncle, at least let me sit with somebody who can talk. Mahal, I’ll even go with Oin or Dori if I have to.”

“The point is to stay watchful and quiet, not to natter like a fishwife.” Thorin’s eyes flash and that is the end of it.

Kili sighs dramatically and sits leaning against the tree-trunk facing Bifur, his legs stretched out before him. He’s focused on cleaning his pipe and Bifur watches him, partly out of curiosity and partly because he has nothing else to do. Kili notices him staring and glares. “You want something?” Bifur only shrugs and hides a smile, now realising why it was that Thorin has paired them together. Kili couldn’t fight with someone who didn't respond to his taunts.

It becomes a game. Bifur stares obviously with that blank, wide-eyed stare, as glassy as a corpse, until Kili’s ears are red. Every time Kili looks up, Bifur slides his eyes just slightly to the right, as though he was looking at the shadows in the trees. “Rack off!” After an hour of this, Kili snaps. He’s working on arrowheads now, shaping flakes of obsidian he’s found along the way with a whetstone and a heavy chunk of granite. Kili takes the head he’s working on, the point almost needle-sharp, and throws it squarely between Bifur’s eyes. He expects it to bounce off his face, but Bifur catches it without blinking and slips it into his pocket with a wry smile.

The next morning, Kili is trying and failing to pointedly ignore him. Bifur can see the flash of blue out of the corner of his eye. _Hungry?_ Sometimes Bofur and Bombur sign while speaking to him out of habit. They’re the only ones here that understand all the secret language of gestures that Bifur spent years adapting. It adds to the air of conspiracy.

 _Yes. Don’t tell Bombur. Already had breakfast._ Bofur grins and breaks him off a piece of fatty, greasy biscuit, made from lard and breadcrumbs. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Kili looking at him. He’s tired and irritated from his watch and doesn’t have the energy to indulge him, so he pretends to be busy sharpening a knife.

“Do you know what you’re saying to one another?” Kili noses about when he thinks Bifur isn’t listening. “With the hands, I mean.”

“Well, ‘course.” Kili chews on his lip. “Bifur worked it all out, just like a real language, or close to. Words for most things, and he has an alphabet to spell things out.”

“ _Bifur_ invented it?” He can hear the gears turning in Kili’s head, struggling to understand how someone as old and crazy as Bifur could invent a language on his own.

“Sure, years and years ago.” Bofur shoots his cousin a sly look. “It was for his wife’s benefit. She couldn’t hear.”

“Like Oin?”

Bofur’s laugh is short and sharp, rough as a dog’s bark. “Nay, lad. Oin’s just fuzzy in his old age. Hlífa was deaf as a post. You could light a firecracker off a foot from her ear and she'd wonder where the smoke came from. He rigged their house with all sorts of clever tricks to get her by. If you rung the doorbell, a little red flag would wave in every room. It was brilliant."

"Is she waiting for him at home?" Bifur’s chest constricts at the innocent question, and he can't pretend to be working on his knife anymore.

"She passed about thirty years ago." Bofur said gently, shooting Bifur a sympathetic look over Kili's bent head. Bifur stares at the ground, wishing his cousin would look somewhere else.

-

Bera married a month after Erebor had fallen in a union of survival rather than of love. Her husband, a steady fellow that Bifur quite liked with a massive carrotish beard, had a number of surviving relations and was kind enough to let Bera name the children after her dead family. Bofur and Bombur were born in the gaunt shadow of the wildlands, bigmouthed, hungry vagrant children whose only image of Erebor was a lopsided arrowhead on yellowed maps.

After Azanulbizar, where his miner’s rags had changed for mail and a sword lay in his hand instead of a pickaxe, they settled in Ered Luin, running westward from their problems until the sea cut them off. There were seams of coal and iron, enough for them to start a tentative line of trade with the nearby settlements of men and the most westward of hobbits. Bifur returned to those narrow tunnels, worming his way through the stone. Bofur and Bombur were old enough to be bored with his censored children’s stories and begged to hear all the gory bits, complaining when Bifur admonished their greedy second-hand bloodlust. He was still so young, not even quite of age, but Bifur already felt in his one-roomed home inside this foreign rock that he had lived for three centuries and all he wanted to do was lie down and sleep.

Without a mother to love him (for if she were still alive, Bifur would certainly still be living under her roof, eating her food and drinking her ale and expecting his socks washed and ready in the morning), too quiet to make any friends to drink and tussle with, and without a wife to look after, Bifur found a yawning emptiness open up in his life. He felt like a piece of clockwork machinery, wound up with a key, going through the motions without any thought or heart behind it. When he wasn’t sleeping or in the mines, he walked a lot, always within the mountain, where it was still and quiet, or sat at home and tinkered with pieces of scrap tin. Silly, little things to while away the few hours between emerging from the mines and laying down his head. The days slipped through his fingers like grains of sand, too many to count, and yet to Bifur it sometimes felt as though no time had passed at all.

-

The next time they have a watch together, it’s in the in the roaming wilderlands between Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains. Kili hasn’t spoken to Bifur since he tried to throw an arrowhead at the crazy old dwarf’s face and he unexpectedly caught it, and tonight it looks like he’s going to keep up his silence, darning a sock in the firelight. His stitches are  crooked and clumsy and too big, and Bifur knows they’ll fall apart in a week, but he can’t speak a word and Kili doesn’t know how to interpret his gestures and pointing. Only Bofur and Bombur can. Bifur doesn’t need to keep his hands busy to entertain himself. He can lean back and let his mind drift on that soft autumn breeze with just a nibble of a chill in it. After living in his head for almost all his life it’s second nature.

When the sock is as finished as Kili can get it, he starts fiddling with pieces of sticks and leaves, trying to make little towers. Bifur watches him try and fail out of the corner of his eye, keeping his smile to himself. He doesn’t have enough support in the bottom, his twigs are the uneven in their thickness and it makes the structure list to one side and finally fall. Kili grows red under his stare and knocks it down with a fist, drawing his knees up to his chest with the graceless sulking of a child.

Bifur thinks for a moment, and clears himself a handspan of space in the leaf-littered ground. He picks good, even-sized twigs out of the dirt and starts to lay his own foundations, head bent and eyes on his work. Kili is watching, he can feel those dark eyes on him (he’s good at sensing when people are staring at him now), and Bifur intentionally works with a slow deliberateness, wordless in his instruction, listening to the rustle of leaves as Kili shuffles in. When his fist-sized structure is a foot high Bifur looks up to see the dwarrow (because, really, that’s all he is) on his knees, studying the slim but sturdy tower with his thick brows knitted together.

Their eyes meet, and Kili opens his mouth to speak. Bifur wishes he wouldn’t disrupt the quietness of the night, with the sounds of the fire, the snoring dwarves, the distant chatter of insects, all a vague and shapeless murmur. There must be something in his face that gives him away, because Kili closes his mouth again and gives him only a nod, returning to his nest in the gnarled tree-roots and searching for fistfuls of twigs in the dirt.

“How was your watch with the crazy old dwarf?” Fili asks in the morning, when he thinks Bifur is sleeping with his eyes closed and nose pointed up at the steely grey sky.

“He’s not half bad, actually. There’s more to Bifur than I thinks he let on.” Then he starts complaining about the stitching on his sock that’s already looking like it’s going to unravel at any moment and that’s the end of it.

-

Ten years - _ten years_ \- after he first entered the mines of Ered Luin, he emerged one day to find a young dam sitting alone in a crumpled heap at the fork in the path leading to town. She kept her eyes downcast, twisting the fraying sleeve of her dress. Bifur called out, but she made no response. He was blackened from coal-dust and didn’t want to touch her, but even as he stood three feet away and yelled, she kept staring down at her wrecked sleeve, rocking back and forth a little.

Finally, he got down on his knees and stretched his hand out, touching her knee and leaving a smudge of black behind on her grubby apron. The dam jerked with an oddly breathless gasp, and their eyes finally met. They were hazel and flecked with gold in the light of Bifur's lantern, swollen from crying. "What's your name?" He whispered. She shook her head and made a slashing motion across her neck and pointed to her left ear. It took Bifur a moment to realise she was trying to tell him she was deaf. While he stared, she scrabbled at her skirts and held out a tiny slate tied to her belt, fumbling in her apron pocket for a stub of chalk.

 _Lost_. Her hands shook and the writing wavered. _Hlífa. Lost._ Using gestures, he managed  to work out approximately where she lived. He wandered the street - nicer than his and full of artisans -  and she broke away and ran towards her own door, banging impatiently on the wood. Her father was a kindly fellow, a little emotional, and didn’t stop wringing Bifur’s hand and stumbling out his thanks. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time Hlífa had wandered off and got lost.

That night, he couldn’t sleep. Bifur stared at the low boards of his ceiling, mouthing Hlífa’s name silently, his heart beating so loud he was sure all of Ered Luin could hear it.

-

The third watch Bifur and Kili share is deep within the shadows of Mirkwood. They light no fires and huddle together in the darkness. There’s nothing to do but to wait and listen, ears tuned to the slightest rustle and creak in the terrifying vacancy around them. Bifur leans against the tree with his legs crossed, Kili as close to him as his youthful, arrogant bravado allowed. He pretends that he’s not scared. After the stone giants and Goblin-town and Azog’s assault on the edge of the cliff, Kili refuses to be scared of something as minor and simple as the dark.

But he’s quieter than Bifur ever remembers him being, and his breathing reminds him of a child pretending to be asleep in bed, shallow and quick and self-conscious. About halfway through their strained, silent watch, some small creature (probably nothing more than an owl’s dinner) shrieks in the muffled blackness. At his side, Kili gasps and clings to Bifur’s elbow, adrift and looking for an anchor.

“Sorry.” Kili breathes, his ragged voice close to Bifur’s ear. But he doesn’t let go, he won’t until Bifur either grunts at him or pushes him away. “I just _hate_ the darkness like this. If I could just see what was out there, I wouldn’t be scared at all.”

There’s a sharp, stinging ache in his chest, like the bite of an insect. Bifur knows exactly what he would say if he could – that there was nothing more sensible than being afraid of the darkness and the secrets it hid, that even he, who had spent half his life in pitch-black mine shafts, was scared right now, that Kili was braver for admitting his fear rather than trying to hide it. But he can’t say anything. Kili can’t even read his expression in the darkness. So Bifur gently rests his free hand over Kili’s, still clinging to his elbow, and squeezes for several silent moments before letting go, hoping that his actions spoke clearly enough for ignorant, thoughtless Kili to understand.

-

Hlífa invaded Bifur’s soul, a spark on a pile of tinder that set him alight and burned him down. He smouldered for a week in this silent torture, his ribcage charred around his flaming heart until finally it grew too much to bear. He combed and braided his hair, wore his best shirt and cleaned his boots and knocked on Hlífa’s door with a rather ragged posey of wildflowers he’d picked himself from the windswept foothills. They looked limp in his hand, starved of light, the petals bruised. Hlífa’s father stood on the threshold and eyed him up and down, this simple miner in his best clothes and a handful of broken flowers. With a tense, guarded smile, he let Bifur in to plead his case.

Finally, he let Bifur take his daughter to a rather crowded inn in the miner’s district, where the food was cheap but delicious and the ale flowed by the barrel-load. They sat in a quiet corner, taking turns to write on Hlífa’s little slate. Most dwarves were obviously afraid of Hlífa’s deafness, snaring their wives with crude nets woven from bawdy jokes and pick-up lines and drunken boasts. But Bifur, who never had the gift of the gab and spent his life with his mouth closed and eyes open, felt unburdened as he communicated in tiny handfuls of words. Each letter became more and more precious as Hlífa’s stick of chalk wore down to a nub. The rest of the world melted into an interminable fog of black and grey, and Bifur was completely deaf to all of it. He learned that Hlífa’s mother died in childbirth, that she lost her hearing after a nasty case of the measles when she was young, and that she lived alone with her father, a mason who loved her more than anything else in the world.

They sat and passed the slate back and forth long into the night until the inn grew dim and quiet, and the keeper told them to either pay for a room or leave. Bifur walked her home and held her hand at the doorway of her house, the street quiet save for the scuttling of rats in the gutters and the thin, distant wail of a restless infant. It was a perfect, sacred moment and he was glad, in a way, that he didn’t have to break it with his clumsy speech. They looked at each other and smiled and it said everything they needed to know.

All the same, Hlífa scrawled on her slate, bold and unashamed, _again?_ Bifur nodded and felt the fire swell in his heart, scouring out the barbed thorns of his fear and grief, burning down the weeds and scrubby bush to expose the lush soil underneath, rich and fertile and ready for planting.

-

"Hey," Kili finds Bifur before they're about to head off on the day's march, tugging at his sleeve. "I just want to, um, say thanks. For last night." He mumbles in his embarrassment, scratching the back of his head. "It was kind of you."

Bifur grunts and shrugs, a breezy _don't mention it_ in any language. Kili's nervous smile widens.

"Just- if you could keep it between us, that'd be nice.  Fili and Dwalin would..." He trails off with a self-conscious laugh. "I forgot. You can't tell them."

Bifur shakes his head and Kili's smile fades. He looks over his shoulder and checks that the coast is clear before leaning in.

"Maybe you could teach me a few words when we're next on the watch together." Kili tries to sound casual, but Bifur senses the nerves. "Y'know, so you have someone else to talk to."

Bifur curls his left hand into a fist with the thumb sticking up, his face creased in one of his rare hidden smiles. _Yes. Good._

-

Three weeks since he met Hlífa, Bifur stood before her father with his hands clasped together. He mumbled that he was just a simple miner, with no real wealth to speak of, that he didn't have a trade or a wealthy father, just his love. The greying dwarf chewed on his pipe and looked hard at Bifur in a minute of silence that was the longest and most painful of his life. Bifur nearly cried when he gave him his dusty blessing and rushed into the sitting room where Hlífa waited, reading a cheap quarto in her second-best dress.

He borrowed her slate and wrote carefully, shielding the words from view. When he was done, he placed it in her lap with shaking hands and fumbled in his pocket for the simple ring he had, carved silver with interlocking runes, a love-prayer.

She gasped in her breathless, silent way and threw herself into his waiting arms, not needing any response.

-

The next night they meet isn't a watch, but they are awake and alone while the world is sleeping. Dressed in their new Lake-Town finery, dwarves sleep on every available surface in the Master's manor, on benches and couches and settes, crammed three to a bed. Bofur snores on the floor underneath the table, still clutching an empty bottle of wine. Bifur can't sleep, he's too interested in the books and curios littered all about the house, and after the rest have gone to bed, he stays up, moving from room to room and fingering picture frames, music boxes, scales, perfume bottles, eyeglasses, and all manner of little trinkets imported from the East.

Bifur opens the door to the Master's dim study and finds Kili curled up on the brocade couch, looking very small in his new blue linens. There's a book open in his lap, but Kili isn't reading. One hand is gently massaging his wounded thigh, and his face is colourless and waxy in the soft light of his candle. "Oh." Kili looks up, eyes ringed with grey. "Bifur. You're awake." Bifur rifles about on the Master's desk and finds a scrap of paper and a pencil stub.

 _You look sick_. Bifur sits on the edge of couch and writes, leaning on Kili's abandoned book. _Tell Oin_.

"No." There's a rasp in Kili's voice, as though he'd been running for hours without water. "I'll be fine.” But there’s an undercurrent of fear creeping in on his familiar, well-worn bravado. “I just need to- Hey,” He interrupts himself and forces a smile. “You said you would teach me a few words in your hand-language, remember?” His hair is damp with sweat and he pushes it back from his face. Kili is so hot that Bifur can feel it from here, where his knee gently touches Kili’s bare ankle. He’s running a bad fever. “Why not now?”

-

After the rush of their engagement, Bifur took things slowly and carefully, safe in the assertion that he had a solid hold on her. He introduced Hlífa to Bera and her husband Rakul at a quiet, simple dinner in his modest home, and then the boys (shoulder-height terrors now, comparing their beards and pinching tobacco from their father and sneaking out the window at all hours) on an afternoon picnic down at the lake. Hlífa was polite and reserved, and despite her little slate and chalk, had no chance of keeping up with the bubbling chatter of conversation that swelled around her.

It got Bifur thinking, late in bed at night. She _wanted_ to get to know her family-to-be, to share in their jokes and stories. She wasn’t like Bifur in that regard, who was happy to wander off in his head and treat everything as vague and distant. She wanted to be a part of this world. He thought about how they could sometimes fumble a very loose conversation with gesture and expression and exaggerated pointing. He thought about the signs they used to use in battle, when they attempted stealthy raids on unsuspecting orcs in those dark tunnels of Moria.

He jumped out of bed then and there, too excited to sleep. There wasn’t any paper around so Bifur took pieces of coal from the fireplace and wrote on the walls, muttering to himself. When Hlífa came over in the morning, Bifur was still in his nightshirt, knees black from coal-dust and ash, the plastered walls of his house scrawled in black like a child’s doodle, all rushed, sloppy lettering and uneven diagrams of hands. With his breath heaving, Bifur explained, scrawling half-sentences on the floor. Hlífa understood in an instant, standing in the middle of the room and turning, around and around and around, taking it all in with a bright, youthful wonder on her face.

-

In the morning, Bifur seeks Thorin out. Kili had fallen asleep a few hours before dawn, pale and exhausted, his skin flaming beneath Bifur’s touch. They’re getting ready to leave very early, the sun outside still watery and cool, and by the time Bifur finds Thorin everyone is almost ready to go, standing in the front room. Bifur dashes a note on a corner of the Master’s ledger and tears it free, running down the stairs and thrusting it in Thorin’s palm. _Kili’s sick._ It reads in Bifur’s writing. _Don’t let him go._ Thorin’s eyes dart down and scan the page, crumpling it in his fist.

Bifur can see Kili trying to hide it, and to the rest, he probably seems all right. Kili doesn’t ever let his guard down, not even around Fili and Thorin. They’re his idols and heroes, and Bifur can see he’s terrified of disappointing them. Perhaps that’s why Kili’s fractionally more honest around him. Or perhaps it’s because Bifur can’t pass on any of his secrets.

When Kili’s held back, he feels guilty. Of course he does. And when Fili stays behind too, Thorin looks aged and ravaged, as though a hundred years has worn through his soul in a heartbeat. The guilt doubles, and Bifur stares resolutely out over the water. The river carries them away, bobbing over the currents that lap as gently as a kitten’s tongue in milk. Bifur stares up at the snow-capped peak, an empty shell filled with ghosts and bones, his childhood home. He stares with mistrust and uncertainty. They’re like dwarrows jostling in the doorway of an empty house rumoured to be haunted, and nobody is brave enough to step inside.

-

The wedding was modest and sparsely attended. Hlífa’s father promised a lavish banquet, but neither of them wanted it, and in the end it was a simple affair in the temple, carrying on afterwards with perhaps a dozen friends and family in a corner of Bifur’s favourite inn. Bofur got drunk and wound up vomiting in the courtyard out back, and Bombur was caught filching sausages from the kitchen. Rakul took them home and Bera stayed, drinking as the crowd thinned out and giving Hlífa lewd advice on her little slate, drawing diagrams that left the virgin dam red-faced and searching for more ale.

They collapsed into Bifur’s bed a little after midnight, tired and drunk, sleeping in their clothes, nestled together on top of the sheets. In the morning, rested and clear-headed, Bifur undressed her and they made love, slow and stumbling and a little unsure. Afterwards, they lay on their sides and looked at each other. Hlífa’s slate was across the room, and she smiled as she curled a fist over her bare chest, as though scooping out her heart, and pressed the flattened palm against Bifur’s ribcage. _Yours_ , she promised, mouthing the word on her silent lips.

-

Dragon’s flame runs hotter than they all remembered. They had all hoped, Thorin most of all, that time would have aged Smaug, made him slow and cumbersome, would have cooled the fire in his belly and dulled his brutally quick mind.

Thorin’s punished once more for his hubris. Bifur stands and stares out across the valley at the toy-town in the distance, burning like a handful of matches. Before, he had told himself how wise it had been to hold Kili back; injured as he was, there would have been no escaping the dragon’s clutches. Now, he couldn’t open his mouth, afraid that he would be sick all down the side of the mountain. _No!_ He screams in his head, staring out at a landscape that would never understand his words. _This isn’t what I wanted to happen!_

There’s a low muttering behind him, a rumble of shock and grief. Gloin is pacing back and forth and wringing his hands. Bombur is sitting down and staring at the swell of his massive belly. Nori is mumbling something in his ear, but Bombur’s as lifeless as one of his daughter’s dolls. Ori is sniffing. Thorin stands with his back to the distant fire, head bent as though in prayer.

-

Some of the signs were obvious. _Big_ was just the palms outwards, swelling. _Small_ was the opposite. _Love_ was a hand on the heart. Bifur began to watch people in the inn, the mines, the market and street, noticing how they pointed to one another and gestured. People already spoke without words, having whole conversations across a busy crowd. He merely refined it.

They practiced signing to one another in their tiny home. Hlífa dusted and swept while Bifur worked the mines, she cooked dinner and breakfast, darned socks and spun linen and scrubbed the floors clean. Bifur’s clumsy drawings remained on the plastered walls, and Hlífa added to them when she thought of a new word or phrase. Together they invented almost a thousand words and an entire alphabet. Bera came over to borrow a bit of thread, to return her rolling pin, and often just to check in. She picked up the signs over six months and started using them outside as they walked to market together, speaking with her mouth as well as her hands.

Bofur and Bombur were bullied into learning it from their mother, begrudging at first. But they quickly realised the value of a secret language and invented their own slew of insults and curse words, signing to one another around their friends and relatives on their father’s side, sniggering and elbowing one another in the side. Rakul learned the signs out of necessity, and within two years the six of them could have a comfortable dinner, speaking with just their hands.

Soon, Hlífa had to learn a new sign. One night Bifur came home to the familiar smell of stew on the fire and a washbowl of heated water and a clean towel on the table. But Hlífa stood with her hands clasped before her, biting her lip. _What?_ He shrugged, frowning. Hlífa sucked in a deep breath and folded her arms across her torso, as though holding an infant close. Then she she pointed to herself and flattened her hands over her stomach, a wobbly smile spreading across her face.

-

There is shouting, laughter, filling the empty halls of Erebor for the first time in over a century. The dwarves are a tangle of limbs and beards and words, tussling and embracing and elbowing a welcome for Fili, Kili, Bofur and Oin. Bifur squeezes his cousin so tight he nearly cracks his ribs, signing to Bofur with shaking hands. _Thought you gone._

Kili ambushes him in his room, tinkering with bits and pieces he’d rescued from the old toymaker’s shop. “Did you rat on me?” He’s sharp and accusing, and it makes Bifur flinch down at his hands before looking up.

He shrugs. _What?_ Kili rolls his eyes and sits cross-legged before Bifur.

“Did you rat on me?” He repeated, voice a little harder. “Nobody else thought I looked all that sick. I saw you slipping Thorin a note, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

Bifur rolls the question around in his head, carefully laying down his wind-up raven before nodding slowly. Kili sighs so heavily it blows his bangs up in the air, shaking his head.

“You nosey busybody.” He snaps. “I was _fine._ ” He’s still rubbing at his leg, it pains him, and the colour hasn’t completely returned to his face, but even if he wanted to, Bifur couldn’t answer back. “I-I mean- It was worse than I thought and I…” He licks his lips. “Maybe I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t.” Kili’s shoulders slump. “I nearly died.” The disobedience flashes in his face. “But I’m still mad at you.”

Bifur tentatively gives him a thumbs up, shrugging at the same time. _Better?_

Kili sighs and nods. “Better now.” But there’s a darkness behind his doe-brown gaze that Bifur doesn’t remember seeing before. It’s like a spark in them has died.

-

They named the boy Bekur, after Bifur’s dead cousin. Bekur was curly-haired and big-mouthed with a powerful pair of lungs. Hlífa slept through his nighttime tears, and it was always Bifur who rocked him back to sleep, unbegrudging no matter how exhausted he was after his long hours at the mines. He was a sturdy-limbed little boy, trailing along behind Bofur and Bombur (troublesome adolescents and far too old for him, although Bekur didn’t seem to mind). He learned to sign as well as talk, and for much of his childhood instinctively did both when he was out, although at home he tended to keep his mouth closed. They moved into a slightly bigger home - two rooms instead of one, and an alcove in the back for Bekur to claim for his own - and Bofur fitted it out with a series of red flags tied to wires and attached to the ceiling, so that whenever the someone pulled the lever outside, an explosion of red colour alerted an unsuspecting Hlífa of any houseguests.

Erebor, his mother, Azanulbizar, his big family, it all melted away into nothingness. Bifur went months without thinking about them. When he was home, Bifur played with his son, fixed the wobbly furniture or the leaking roof, else he tinkered about with bits of scrap tin. Once a week for ten years they visited Hlífa’s father for dinner, the ageing dwarf doting on his grandson and giving him toys and treats, pretending not to notice when Hlífa accused him of spoiling Bekur. He caught a sickness in his chest and died in bed with Bifur and Beur and Hlífa around him, holding his hands. He was smiling.

They moved into the family home, filling it with their rough-hewn furniture and hand-woven blankets and the flag-system. There was a fair amount of money left over and Bifur didn’t need to work quite so long in the mines. He took to spending his afternoons making toys, and after one of Bekur’s friends remarked that it was _cool_ , started giving them away as presents. He slept in his wife’s arms, cocooned from the outside world, wrapped in a gentle silence that shielded him from the darkness.

-

Kili and Bifur share a watch over the Front Gate for what the both of them feel in their bones is the last time. It’s different to Lake-Town and Mirkwood. Tarnished is what Bifur would call it, if he had to give it a word. Kili has forgiven Bifur, but he’s hardened and drawn in the moonlight, his eyes drifting out over the landscape to the camp of Thranduil and his elves.

Bifur shakes his shoulder. _What you looking at?_ Kili’s learned enough to have simple conversations, and when he doesn’t know a word, he can just ask and Bifur will sign it out. Kili licks his lips and tosses one last glance over the gate before drawing in.

“Have you…” He whispers. “Have you ever been in love before?” It was the last thing Bifur expected to hear. “I know you were married, but… did you love her?”

Slowly, Bifur nods. He expands his hands out, out, out, trying to imply a sense of infiniteness and eternity. Kili watches him, eyes black in the moonlight. He pressed his hand over his chest, _love_ , and stretched his hands out again.

“You loved her a lot, huh?” Kili sighs and leans against the stone. He chuckles a little, despite himself, and there’s a glimpse of the old Kili, the chattering dwarrow from Ered Luin who played pranks and cracked jokes and told stories to anyone who would listen. “Sorry, it’s just… odd, I s’pose, to think that you’d be in love with someone, y’know?”

He can’t deny that. Bifur shrugs and tents his fingers together spreading them out. _Perfect._ Kili watches his hands move in the silver light. _Everything I wanted._

“How did she die?” Kili asks bluntly, catching Bifur off-guard. “Sorry- It’s just that nobody told me. Did she get sick?”

Bofur shook his head and made a quick slashing motion with three fingers. It’s a sign he picked up from the battlefield; _orcs._ Kili stands up at that, hands at his side. _Son._ Bifur squeezes his eyes shut and battles the crush of grief that swells in his throat. _Son died too._

“I didn’t know.” Kili breathes, one hand on Bifur’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Bifur.” He lifts his hands and signs, one hand drifting from the heart to the mouth and then down. _Sorry_.

Bifur breathes in heavily, fighting back the old anguish with a practised steadiness. Kili watches him with a tenderness, as though caring for a very elderly relative. _Was happy._ He insisted. _Very happy. Best thing to happen to me. Glad I took chance._

Kili stares out over the landscape again, at the elvish tents, and with a little click in his head, Bifur puts the pieces together in his mind and bears the revelation in his usual calm silence.

-

When Bekur was twenty, they decided to make a short journey south. Hlífa’s cousin, a close friend when they were younger, was getting married, and she begged and begged to go. It wasn’t long, a week at most, and Bifur didn’t think much of it at all when he agreed.

They came in the night, four days after Bifur set out with his wife and son. They were just a quarter-mile from a village down in the foothills of his craggy range, and Bifur thought it was safe. Nothing wild had been seen in this area for months and months. Even cautious Balin had said back in Ered Luin the chances of anything happening were a hundred to one.

It wasn’t a scream in the night that alerted Bifur to their presence, or the snarl of a beast. It was the snapping of a twig behind him, a tiny, inconspicuous sound that meant nothing to him at the time (although later he would hear it over and over in his dreams and wake up sobbing). Then they were there, a rush of black and grey and then an axe came down on his head and Bifur didn’t see or hear anything else for a long, long time.

-

He awoke in a strange bed, with the colours all muddled and melting together lie candlewax. Somebody spoke, vague and garbled in his head, and Bifur faded out again. The murkiness lasted for over a week. His head was on fire, constantly, the agonising pain making it impossible to think of anything else. Bifur couldn’t move, couldn’t open his mouth, couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear or taste or touch or smell. He just lay there and waited for his broken body to stitch itself back together.

Slowly, he gained flashing moments of clarity. He saw a face he remembered, Bera, smiling with her eyes all red. She spoke, the word-sounds not matching up with the movement of her lips, coming out like a foreign language. She laid her hands on him, but it was a moment before he felt her touch. Everything lagged behind, disjointed and out of time and still he couldn’t move.

After two weeks of this, Bifur began to slowly, slowly, move his arms. He lifted them weakly and traced his skin, sagging like old dough in his immobility. Bera was sitting with him when he first felt the axe-head in his skull, the beaten orcish metal jutting out of flesh and bone. He whimpered and tried to rip it out, and Bera held his hand tight, begging him to leave it alone. It was too dangerous to take it out, she pleaded, words bubbling as though she tried to speak underwater. He couldn’t speak and when he tried to sign his questions, his hands were slow and sluggish and didn’t respond in time with his aching mind. _Hlífa_ , he could sign single words at a time and he did that whenever he had the strength. _Bekur. Hlífa._ Bera tucked the sheets around him and fought back tears and Bifur began to suspect the very, very worst, begging with his trembling hands for his cousin to tell the truth. After several days, she did. She held Bifur’s hand gently, thumbs rubbing circles over his palm, crying as she told him that Hlífa and Bekur had been killed and they had found bones, methodically stripped of flesh, in the orcish campsite that had been raided by nearby men after the attack.

Bifur didn’t cry. He laid there with his eyes closed and felt the grief kill him slowly, squeezing the life out of his heart. He wouldn’t talk again, not ever, nor would he re-enter a mine, but he would learn to feed himself again in two weeks, relieve himself in a month, walk unsteadily in six, read and write again after a year. Bifur and Bombur would cheer him up as best they could, tell stories, hold him while he stumbled and lurched with his crutches and his walking stick, read to him. Rakul sat for several minutes at a time, puffing at his pipe and saying he was dreadfully sorry, old chap, and he had a home here as long as he wanted it. Bera hovered like an anxious mother and didn’t like leaving him alone for more than a few minutes at a time.

But despite all of it, their love and care fell on his heart as ineffectually as rain on stone. Bifur went through the motions of life again, the way he did after losing his first family, going on and on and not knowing why.

-

They bring Kili's body down from Ravenhill in a stretcher. There's no blanket to cover him and his empty eyes stare blindly up at the clouded winter sky. His face is bloodied and bruised, but apart from the starburst of red across his chest, his body is undamaged. It would have been quick. Not painless, but quick.

It's so brutal and senseless, what has happened. Everybody goes about in a daze, silent and fumbling through the rebuild. A week after they died, Thorin, Fili and Kili are buried deep in the heart of Erebor. Three stone coffins lie in a row, their names carved with a geometric rigidness on the front. They’re building statues of the three, larger than life and in their finest mail, to stand guard at the head of each tomb, but they’re not done yet.

There’s a feast afterwards. It’s supposed to be a commemoration, but Bifur can’t bring himself to eat. His gut swirls and cramps and his throat burns with the familiar bitterness of bile. He slips away into a side-room lined with benches, sinking into the nearest opposite the door and bathing himself in the quiet with his hands over his face. After a short time, Bofur comes in and sits down beside him; he doesn’t say anything, he just sits, one hand on Bifur’s shoulder, occasionally squeezing him tight.

Bombur comes in after a few minutes to see where they had gone. Then Nori, then Ori, then Dori, then Gloin and within half an hour they’re all sitting in the quietness, even Bilbo, squeezed in tight between Nori and Bofur with his eyes all red and hair on end.

“Say,” Nori breaks the silence after a time, springing up from his bench. He vanishes and came back with a bottle of port, the really strong stuff that Thranduil imports from Dorwinion, and ten tiny little crystal glasses. He hands the glasses out then pours the stuff drink all around, deep and rich as liquid rubies. Balin has to shake his brother’s shoulder to get him to lift his head. Ori’s crying so hard that Bifur isn’t sure he can drink and swallow. Mumbled thanks drift in a stream around the room until everybody has their filled glass, and Nori holds the bottle, raised in a toast.

“To the most arrogant, stubborn, proud- and bravest bastards I ever had the joy of knowing.” Nori’s voice wobbles. They drank silently, dropping or tossing their glasses to the floor when they were done. Dwalin vehemently throws his so it smashes into diamond-sized slivers, mouth fixed in a shaking line. He would have died for any of them on that hill, would have suffered the worst ending imaginable if it would have saved just one. He reeks of shame and failure.

The room is too pensive for talking, so Bofur taps his cousin's shoulder and uses his hands. _Holding up? You and Kili got close after night watches._

Bifur nods. What can he say? Battle punishes courage and valour; he's seen it all before. There's nothing particularly shocking in their deaths. It's not like he has any claim Kili, any cause for special grief like Dwalin and Ori. He's just the crazy old dwarf who talks with his hands and hovers about on fringes.

A pall of silence settles over the exhausted company of ten dwarves and one mourning hobbit. Through the next room, they can hear Dain’s soldiers celebrate victory with the Lake-Town men, snatches of song trickling  like spring water through layers of mountain-rock. But none of them can bring themselves to utter a word.

-

Seven months after the not-accident, Bifur visited the tombs for the first time with Bofur. He could have been carried, but it became a goal for him to walk the half-mile down into the catacombs without a crutch or a walking stick. It was a reason to keep on going.

Hlífa and Bekur were buried next to her Papa, lying in the rock like bees in a hive, stacked precisely at exact angles. He ran his fingertips over the carving of his wife's name and then it finally became real to him after the long months of disbelief, the waiting for Hlífa to walk through the door with Bekur in tow. Until then, Bifur could almost pretend they were away on a journey, still with her cousin, that it was only matter of time before she came back. Bifur sank forward and clutched at the stone to support himself. They weren't coming back to him, ever.

"Hold on, hold on." Bofur threw an arm over his cousin and held him up. "I've got you, Bifur." They sank slowly, gently, with a little thump. Bifur gripped tattered handfuls of cloth and buries his face in his cousin's shoulder. They were gone. Death had an ugly finality; even thinking the word left a bitterness on his tongue, as though he'd swallowed poison. He felt cursed, kneeling in the dust bedside his son's tomb. They were gone and he was left a broken, staggering mute.

Bofur led him home, tucked him into bed heated up a bowl of broth. Bifur was too tired to raise his arms so Bofur fed him, propped up against every pillow in the house.

"It'll get better." The young dwarf mumbled. "Day by day, until it won't even hurt to think about them." Bofur flashed his trademark grin, a pale copy of his usual cheer.

Bifur closed his eyes and waited to fall asleep, or for Bofur to go away, whatever came first.

-

It’s a chilly, brisk morning. Bifur sits on a stone ledge outside the front gate, overlooking the valley and turning a half-shaped arrowhead over and over in his hands. He’s mostly ignored. _Crazy old coot_ , the Lake-Town men mutter to one another. _Off his rocker._

Was it his fault? Bifur stares at the little flake of stone, a frown stitching his heavy brows together. The sharpened edge bites into his thumb and leaves a little pink mark which turns white and fades. Did Bifur's words about his wife inspire Kili to die for that flame-haired elf lass? Why else would Kili want to know if he was ever in love?

“Ah, there you are.” Bofur and Bombur come up behind him and sit on either side. “Enjoying the view, hm?”

Bifur slips the arrowhead into his pocket with a nod and taps his temple. _Thinking._ He spells Kili’s name out with his hands, and afterwards doesn’t know quite how to relay what he’s thinking, so he lets them fall, palms on his thighs.

“Aye,” Bombur’s voice is low and gravelly. “Shame, that. Blasted shame. Those lads…” He trails off with a shake of the head.

 _Was nice._ Bifur blinks back his agony, the slow reopening of an old wound. _Reminded me of my boy._ His head is bent but he knows Bombur and Bofur are looking over him, shooting quizzical looks at one another. The breeze whispers against his face and dries salt-tracks on his skin. The other men seemed to have gone off on their own errands and his cousins have stopped talking. Even the scrabbling thoughts in his head seem to have stilled. Bifur lifts his head and closes his eyes to feel the sun on his face, braids rustling against his cheeks.

He’ll grieve, as he always has. He’ll be broody and crazy and silent. The dead will lie in their graves and he’ll go on, speaking with his hands in a world where so few could hear him. He’ll retreat into isolation and churn out toy after toy for dead orc-slain dwarrows, and in his heart, there’s a sort of peace that comes with that, heavy and sombre. All he can do is go on.


End file.
